From eos8d at virginia.edu Mon Oct 20 09:42:55 2008
From: eos8d at virginia.edu (Bess Sadler)
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:42:55 -0400
Subject: [Blacklight-development] Several Questions about Blacklight
In-Reply-To: <200810201033.AA03477@lpc0335.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp>
References: <200810201033.AA03477@lpc0335.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp>
Message-ID: <91D1E297-3D90-4598-9281-CA434303F45E@virginia.edu>
Dear Erika,
Great to hear from you! We plan to release the beta version of
Blacklight on 3 November 2008, but there won't be any more
substantial changes between now and then, mainly just CSS and some
styling changes, so you could start playing with it now and have a
good idea of whether it would meet your needs.
I'm copying the blacklight-development mailing list here, because
that would also be a good place for you to ask questions and get
answers.
Blacklight is similar to vufind in many ways, for example the use of
lucene and solr, and in fact we share the same indexing code, in the
form of a project called SolrMarc. The main differences are:
1. Blacklight is written in Ruby on Rails, and VuFind is written in
PHP. Being written in Ruby on Rails enforces the separation of the
business logic from the presentation layer, which I believe allows
the application to be customized more easily, and helps to ensure
that the code is well organized. Some organizations also prefer to
deploy Ruby code rather than PHP, for example if they have more staff
who know Ruby.
2. Blacklight is designed to be more flexible than VuFind for
libraries who have many kinds of objects and many kinds of libraries.
It is easy to create a default catalog and then also create
specialized views on the collection for special populations or
buildings; for example we have a default catalog and then also a
music catalog, which has more music-specific facets (e.g., musical
instruments) and different relevancy ranking algorithms (e.g., the
composer field is weighted for the music search, but not for the
regular catalog search). We also have a flexible system for creating
different views for different kinds of items, whereas the last time I
looked at VuFind their system displayed every object the same as if
it were a book.
We wanted this functionality so that we could include not only the
items from our ILS but also any items from other collections, and
have tailored displays for each of them. For example, here are some
coins from our university art museum, which have different display
and behavior from our books or music CDs or DVDs:
http://blacklightdev.lib.virginia.edu/catalog?source_facet=U.Va.+Art
+Museum
And here is our music catalog. You can see the music-specific facets
(like instrument) on the left:
http://blacklightdev.lib.virginia.edu/catalog?portal=music
In general, VuFind has been in use longer and has a larger community
around it. It has a robust system of plug-ins to tie it to various
commercial ILS platforms, and it is generally a very good project.
However, it was important to us to create a system that would be
flexible enough to display material from a variety of sources and to
be able to tailor the display and behavior of a variety of objects,
and those are the strengths of Blacklight.
I hope this answers your questions, and that you'll be interested in
giving Blacklight a try. You can sign up for the mailing list here:
https://rubyforge.org/mail/?group_id=5235
And more information can be found here: http://
blacklight.rubyforge.org and here: http://blacklightopac.org
The webpage and documentation pages have unfortunately been neglected
as we've been getting the code ready for release, but I hope we'll
have time to update those soon. And of course the beauty of open
source is that if you want to get involved, we would welcome your
participation and you could help with some of these tasks!
Good luck with your new OPAC and please let us know how your project
goes, and whether you decide to give Blacklight a try.
Best wishes,
Bess Sadler
On Oct 20, 2008, at 6:33 AM, Eriko Kudo wrote:
> Dear Blacklight project team at UVA,
>
> My name is Erika Kudo, ILL librarian at Kyushu University Library
> in Japan.
> I also have been working for a project of implementing next-
> generation OPAC into our ILS system.
> Now our team are very interested in your Blacklight project for our
> system.
> We have been looking your demo site for a while and it looks really
> overwhelming.
> So we have a couple of questions about it.
>
> 1. When will be Blacklight beta version released?
> Our time is limited: our implementation is to be December 2009. In
> addition, we need to
> customize it for our Japanese users in terms of language differences.
>
> 2. How is Blacklight similar to VuFind?
> Both sources use the same items such as Apache Lucene, solr, etc.
> We are preparing for
> implementing VuFind right now, however, we are thinking of change
> our decision if your Blacklight
> meets our needs.
>
> Hope we could hear from you very soon.
> Thank you,
>
>
> --------------------------------------
> Erika Kudo?kudoe at lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp
> Kyushu University Library
> Document Delivery Section
> TEL: 81-92-642-2335
> FAX: 81-92-672-2340
> --------------------------------------